BREAKING NEWS

Dropkick Murphys stumble upon a sonic pot of gold

Loud and proud, with bagpipes

GEOFFREY HIMES, For The Chronicle

Published
6:30 am CST, Sunday, March 5, 2006

The latest Dropkick Murphys album, The Warrior's Code, opens with bagpipes blowing a melancholy melody, the sound you often hear in a cemetery whenever an Irish cop is laid to rest. After 20 seconds of that, however, a punk band barges into the track with galloping drums, staccato bass notes and an onslaught of guitars. But the bagpipes aren't chased away; they join right in with the faster, fiercer music.

The song is Your Spirit's Alive, and if you listen to the lyrics, you understand why the tune opened with funereal pipes. "Farewell, my brother," Al Barr sings over the raucous beat, "you're off to the big rink in the sky." The song was inspired by a funeral where the DKMs played for Greg "Chickenman" Riley, a longtime friend and fellow hockey fanatic who died in a motorcycle accident. The chorus, "And through it all, your spirit's alive," has the bouncy, sing-along quality that would make it perfect for an old-fashioned Irish wake if it were played at one-third the speed. Or it could have been an old Clash track if not for the bagpipes.

That's the secret of the Dropkick Murphys, who perform at the Warehouse Live on Thursday. They have recognized and exploited the overlooked overlap between Irish drinking songs and punk rock. The Boston septet has been around since 1996, but The Warrior's Code is their best album by far, because the catchy melodies and punchy beats are more tightly woven than ever, and the themes of death and war raise the stakes.

"Greg was my best friend," says Ken Casey, the band's co-founder, bassist and producer. "We played in the same hockey league and had season tickets to the Boston Bruins together. He worked for the telephone company, and when he was recuperating from a bad fall, he came out on tour with us and became like an eighth member of the band. If you became too whiny, he'd put you in your place in a minute; he always made you see how fortunate you are.

"We played at his funeral, because we knew it was something he would have wanted. Did his older relatives like our music? Probably not, but they understood, and the music actually made everyone feel better."

CASEY and his bandmates didn't set out to write Irish wake songs; they just wanted to be a punk band playing the all-ages clubs around the Boston area. For months, they'd just count off, "One, two, three, four," and play their favorite tunes. But when they wrote their first song, Barroom Hero, they were surprised to hear how much the vocal melody sounded like the old Irish songs their parents were always singing. They thought they had rejected all that.

"It dawned on us that Irish music was a bigger influence on all of us than we'd realized," Casey admits. "Growing up in Boston, every time you went to a wedding or a wake or your grandparents' house, you heard that music. I went through a phase of hating it just because it's what my (folks) listened to.

"But as I got older, I came around; I began to notice that people were enjoying themselves listening to that music. ... And when we heard the Irish music with the punk rock, we found they went together hand in hand. Punk is a kind of sing-along music with a rousing energy. And Irish music is the same thing."

The Dropkick Murphys weren't the first musicians to attempt this fusion, but they brought something new to the combination. Their best-known predecessors were the Pogues, the London band that performed old Irish folk songs and new Irish-folk originals with a raw, raucous delivery. They were essentially a string band that incorporated punk elements, while the DKMs were a punk band that borrowed folk elements. The Pogues' lead singer Shane MacGowan would later make a guest appearance on the DKMs' 2000 album, Sing Loud, Sing Proud, but the Boston band was always louder and rougher than their London colleagues.

"It's a fine line you have to walk when you're combining musics," Casey points out. "The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are a perfect example of how to adapt roots; they bastardized ska the way we bastardized Irish music. They upset a lot of ska purists the same way we upset a lot of Irish purists and we both upset a lot of punk purists."

BOSTON'S Mighty Mighty Bosstones gave the DKMs their big break by taking the younger band along as the opening act of a 1997 tour. That helped the Dropkick Murphys develop enough of a following that they could expand their lineup to include the bagpipes and mandolin they were featuring on their studio recordings. This year, the DKMs are extending a similar helping hand to the Tossers, the Chicago septet whose latest album is The Valley of the Shadow of Death. With a lineup of guitar, bass, drums, fiddle, mandolin, tin whistle and banjo, the Tossers are more acoustic and folk-rooted than their Boston benefactors.

"I like a few of the bands that are combining Irish music and punk — the Tossers, the Neck from London and Fogging Molly from L.A. — but there are a lot of crappy bands out there, too. You can't just take an electric guitar and a mandolin and be good; there's more to it than that."

Like their heroes, Stiff Little Fingers and the Clash, the DKMs have always included political songs among their drinking songs and girl songs. Their working-class numbers attracted the attention of Nora Guthrie, the mother of a diehard DKMs fan and the daughter of Woody Guthrie.

As she had with Billy Bragg and Wilco, Nora invited the DKMs to look through Woody's unrecorded song lyrics and pick out a few to set to music. After donning white gloves at the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, Casey leafed through the 60-year-old manuscripts in Woody's own handwriting. He picked out Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight, which became the title track of the 2003 DKMs album, Blackout, and I'm Shipping Up to Boston, which is included on The Warrior's Code.

"The minute I read Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight," Casey recalls, "I knew it would be perfect for some music we'd already written. That was a pretty heavy song, about the air raids in London and how, if you don't shut your lights off, you might be responsible for a lot of people dying. I'm Shipping Up to Boston, is at the opposite end of the spectrum; it's a very silly song about a guy with a wooden leg who lost it when he got drunk in Boston.

"It showed the broad spectrum of Woody's songwriting. ... To me, when a band is too political, they seem too serious and lose me as a listener, just as they do if they're too silly or too cynical. ... We want our records to reflect our lives, sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes silly, sometimes tragic."

The tragic reappears near the end of the new record. The band had already written a song called Last Letter Home, based on letters from U.S. soldiers in Iraq, when they received an invitation to play at another funeral. This was for someone they didn't know, a Sgt. Andrew Farrar. The dead sergeant's brother shared a letter from Farrar to his mother, a note that said if anything should happen to him in Iraq, he'd like the Dropkick Murphys to play Fields of Athenry at his funeral. So they did. And they rewrote Last Letter Home to quote from the soldier's final epistle: "I'm gonna be home soon; it's time to watch the children grow up. I wanna be more than a voice on the phone."

"I hope to God our next record doesn't have so many songs about death," Casey says. "It's a strong emotion, and if you're going through that phase when you're writing, the songs can have an added passion to them. But, hopefully, I'll find my enthusiasm somewhere else next time."